Chelsea Handler Is Ready for Her Late-Night Return: ‘I Know What I Want to Do’
“The immediacy of each show each night is energizing,” offers Chelsea Handler.
The famed comedienne is reflecting on her week-long stint guest-hosting The Daily Show, where she filled in for the recently-departed Trevor Noah. Handler earned raves behind the desk for her acerbic takes on everything from George Santos (“an absolute bitch”) to Marjorie Taylor Greene (“one of those dogs that needs a big back yard to run outside and expend all of her energy”). She exuded her trademark confidence and felt like a natural fit for the role — one that she makes no secret of wanting. Nine years after leaving E!’s Chelsea Lately, and five years after the end of her Netflix talk show Chelsea — the streamer’s first-ever talk show — she says she’s ready to return to the late-night game.
More from Rolling Stone
Netflix's 'My Dad the Bounty Hunter' Is an Afrofuturist Marvel
Why It Took So Long for Two Black Quarterbacks to Face Off in the Super Bowl
“It’s not like you put out a special and then a few months later nobody’s talking about it,” she tells Rolling Stone. “You do an episode a night, so there’s something relevant all the time.”
She’s kept plenty busy in the meantime, of course. There was her Netflix docuseries; a pair of stand-up specials, including the recent Netflix one Revolution; and her bestselling memoir, Life Will Be the Death of Me… and you too!
In a wide-ranging talk with Rolling Stone, Handler dished on everything from giving Woody Allen a piece of her mind during a bizarre dinner at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion to that time she found herself very stoned with George W. Bush as he proudly showed off his paintings.
Did you catch the Super Bowl the other night?
[Laughs] You know what? I did not! I missed the Super Bowl somehow. I was on my way to see it, and then I got sidetracked, and then I was in bed very early. What even happened? Who won?! I don’t even know! I saw that Rihanna was pregnant. Isn’t her baby like three months old?
She had her first child in May. Her and A$AP aren’t wasting any time, I guess!
No! They have to get after it.
Are you up in Canada at Whistler now?
I am! I’m just sitting up here in my pre-ski gear talking to you before I go out for a day of skiing.
I read that you bought your place at Whistler just prior to the 2020 presidential election.
It’s not in America, so there’s that. I’ve been coming here for ten-plus years. I’m always here with my family, and always come on my birthday. It was a dream of mine to have a place up here, and right before the election I was like, “OK, seriously: What if Trump does run again? What is my game plan? I was not going to sit around for four years in America listening to that nonsense. I purchased this house over FaceTime. [Laughs]
Your birthday videos of you skiing in the buff have become an annual tradition. Do you just freeze your ass off taking those? How does it work?
It’s pretty cold out here this year! First of all, I’m a cold person. I like cold. I have to sleep with air conditioning. Also, when you take your clothes off and you’re skiing down a mountain, there’s so much adrenaline that you can tough it out.
Have you ever eaten it filming one of those videos?
[Laughs] No. Typically, you’re not skiing very hard down that terrain if I can hold a margarita and a joint in my hand. That’s the dilemma with this year’s video. I’m like, do I do something really fun and challenging? Because if I do, I can’t hold a joint and a margarita. These are the dilemmas I’m working with right now, FYI. These are the kinds of decisions that I’m consulting with an astrologer on.
How did The Daily Show guest-hosting gig come together?
Trevor [Noah] quit — very publicly — and they scrambled to have a bunch of guest hosts do it, and I think they were going out to a lot of people and I either was one of them, we told them I wanted to do it, or one of those two things happened.
I thought the way that Trevor quit was pretty outstanding, because he was stepping out with Dua Lipa at the time and then suddenly quit his job, which seemed like a flex.
That is funny. I mean, he did it for seven years. I quit abruptly hosting my show, Chelsea Lately, after seven years. There’s a seven-year itch that happens in that medium. It’s really hard work — not in the sense that it’s so challenging, but it’s time-consuming. You have to be thinking all the time. It’s a lot more of a job than most people may think. It’s not like you just show up for an hour and get on camera. If you care about what you’re doing, it’s a 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. job. And there are so many people behind the scenes working hard. That’s why it’s nice to walk into a smoothly-oiled machine — is it “smoothly-oiled?”
Well-oiled.
[Laughs] Right. Well-oiled. I already smoked half a joint this morning. It’s nice to walk into a well-oiled machine and bring your A-game too. I was really collaborating with all the writers on everything. It’s their show more than my show, and I was coming in for a week to say, let’s put some energy into this and do something different. Let’s embrace the change and keep the vibes high. There’s so little representation when it comes to female relatability. Why are we only having men tell us about the news? There are some women in news, and in late-night there are two women, but they just fired Samantha Bee. Why are we having men tell us what the fuck is going on after we just spent five years explaining that we don’t like being explained to? It’s just so silly that there isn’t female representation so that a woman call tell other women what the fuck is going on.
How did you find your experience hosting The Daily Show?
I guest-hosted Jimmy Kimmel’s show last year, and that was a big week because Roe v. Wade had just gotten overturned, so there was a lot to say as a woman. That reignited my interest and reminded myself what I’m good at. It’s so easy for me. It’s just so natural for me. I’m curious about the news. I read the paper every day. I want to regurgitate it, make it funny, but also have people understand the state of affairs we’re in in a comedic way, because we all know how tragic and boring the news can be, and how it heightens your blood pressure and makes you depressed. There’s a need for a new kind of energy in late-night for people to want to watch it and want to learn without feeling like they’re being given medicine.
Obviously, The Daily Show chair is up for grabs now. Is this a gig you want permanently? Do you want to return to hosting a late-night show?
Yeah. Absolutely. You could look at it as [an audition]. I’m grateful, above everything, that I know this now. I know what I want to do, and I can do it. People were super bummed when Trevor left, so it’s an opportunity to put some energy behind it and go in a completely new direction.
I really enjoyed your Daily Show riff on George Santos.
Oh, George Santos! You should hear my friends from Canada. They’re like, “Who’s George Santos? Is that a real person?!” And I have to explain to them, yes, in American politics we have a George Santos and a Marjorie Taylor Greene. I just did an Instagram video about George Santos. He definitely has filler and some other stuff in his face. It’s so obvious. You can tell.
You also had a good dig at Elon Musk collecting children on The Daily Show. I know you’re on Twitter, so what do you feel his tenure as owner has been like?
I’m not a fan of Elon Musk. He just seems like another megalomaniac. Use your money on the planet we’re living on, and to help homeless people or people who can’t afford healthcare. Figure out the problems we have here. Don’t just go to Mars so you can masturbate. He needs to stop having children. He needs to get his tubes tied.
Were the Trump years sort of a line in the sand for you as far as political activism goes? And what was your relationship to politics like before then?
I got really enraged when he was elected. I thought that people were voting for the demise of America. Now I realize that was flip in the larger scheme of things, but at the moment it felt very immediate and life-threatening for everybody. I just couldn’t believe it! So, I was really heavily active — and overly so, probably, but I couldn’t help myself. Some people were like, “You have to stop banging on about it,” and eventually I thought that maybe my banging on about it wasn’t helping, and that I was doing a disservice to the movement of democracy and truth by talking about it too much and diminishing the value of what I was saying by oversaying it. So, I recalibrated by trying to be more clutch in when I said something, because that does have a more lasting impact than spouting off about it all the time. That’s why I like the balance of The Daily Show. It has politics and pop culture. You don’t have to be one-dimensional like Tucker Carlson’s show.
It was reported that you had dinner once at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion. I read that Prince Andrew and Woody Allen were also there. Looking back on it, was that one of the more surreal experiences of your life?
Pretty much. I went there — I don’t remember what year it was, but it was before I knew any of the bad stuff about Jeffrey Epstein, though apparently he had been caught earlier — with Katie Couric, and there was some publicist, this Peggy Siegal woman, who was friends with Katie. I had seen [Peggy] around, I guess. Anyway, we get to this ridiculous house in New York City — the biggest house I’ve ever been in. I was like, “Are we at the Rockefellers? What is this?” I didn’t know who Jeffrey Epstein was. I see Prince Andrew, and I knew who he was. There was this other guy that got canceled that was there, Charlie Rose, and then Woody Allen and Soon-Yi came in at the end, and I was like, “What the hell is this?” There were like eight people at most. I might be forgetting a few people. It was a pretty ridiculous night. All I remember is thinking to myself, “I can’t be here!” Forget about Jeffrey Epstein — I didn’t even know who he was — I was thinking I couldn’t be there because of Woody Allen. I can’t control my outbursts. This was pre-therapy, so who knew what was going to come out of my mouth. Even I didn’t.
I was sitting there and getting so mad on behalf of all women. I was like, “I can’t be here, as a woman, and not say something to [Allen].” I just waited and waited and waited until there was an appropriate time, because I knew I had to. There was no way I was leaving there without doing something. So, after a while, he’s eating his cobbler, and as he’s chewing on it, I lean into him and Soon-Yi and say, “So… how did you two meet?” And then he spit out his cobbler and was laughing. She didn’t really understand what I said. And then Katie Couric was like, “OK Chelsea, time to go!” And that was my only experience at Jeffrey Epstein’s house! I’ve never been on his plane, or a flight, or anything like that, so everyone can just shut up about that already.
That’s a pretty great line to Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. Have you ever been to a weirder get-together than that? Or is that the most surreal?
Oh, please. Last summer, we ended up at George W. Bush’s house at Kennebunkport. I somehow ended up at a pickleball game in Kennebunkport and was like, “I can’t be here! I can’t be seen with this man!” And I was stoned on top of it, and [Bush] was showing me his artwork. I wouldn’t take off my sunglasses and finally he was like, “Can you please take off your sunglasses?” I said, “It’s best that I don’t. I’m pretty stoned.” And then I looked at his artwork and I didn’t know what else to say, so I said, “The paint is so… thick.”
Did he show you his Putin paintings?
No, we didn’t get that far. I got out of there pretty fast because I didn’t want to confront him about the war or anything like that.
What did you actually think of his paintings?
I’m a Philistine when it comes to art. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t want to make any comments on anyone’s artwork.
The end of your recent stand-up special, Revolution, contains the onscreen message, “I still believe in love. And I know now, more than ever before, that my person is coming.” It’s a lovely coda, but where did that sentiment come from?
It was an overall message. It was a coming-around-the-mountain idea about how everything that doesn’t work out is a beginning, and to remember that about everything in life. When something doesn’t go your way, it’s OK, because there’s something else coming for you that’s meant for you. That’s in regard to your professional life and your personal life. Everything that I do I just want to make sure people feel better after seeing it. That they’re inspired or believe in love. I want people to think, “I have a champion here.” What’s important to me is the response I’m getting from people about how inspired they are to live their own lives in a truer way, and what better way to be able to deliver that than comedy?
And you have a live tour coming up. What’s in store for people?
Yes. Little Big Bitch. This tour is based on a story of when I was a little girl and I went on my first airplane ride with my mom and two of my sisters, and we were flying from New Jersey to L.A., and we were passing the first-class section. I was like, “Mom, who are those people?” And she goes, “Oh, that’s first class. We’ll never be able to afford first class.” And I was like, “Speak for yourself.” I came home from California and I was ten years old, but I lied and said I was 13 and started a babysitting company of my own. I was babysitting for a fourteen-year-old for an entire summer. I saved $3,500 that summer.
Three years later I’m thirteen years old, and I went to a travel agency with my friend’s mom and bought a first-class ticket. The next time we got on the plane, I’m with my mom and two brothers this time, and we walk past the first-class section and I see my seat, 2A, and I tell them, “This is my seat. I’ll see you guys at the end of the flight.” And my brothers were like, “There’s no way that’s your ticket. If that’s your ticket, you have to give it to mom.” And I was like, “There’s no way mom is taking my first-class ticket. I’ve worked for this.” And I haven’t flown coach since. So, the theme of the Little Big Bitch Tour is stories from my childhood to show people where all this came from.
Best of Rolling Stone
